Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Regarding gender, democracy and participation, workload is an issue. This is why I mentioned the issue of pay and conditions because increasingly, councillors have an enormous amount of work to do at local level from planning to housing and very often, the councillor is the first point of call in terms of representations on these issues. At county council level in particular, the geographic terrain in some rural areas that councillors have to cover has become larger since the changes of 2014 and county councillors have an enormous workload, which militates against women becoming involved to that degree. Less travelling to meetings is something that could be encouraged. Travelling to meetings is something people bring upon themselves and is not healthy or good. The workload in larger areas has become enormous while in cities, there is more intense engagement regarding a range of issues. That is a factor we need to work on.

Regarding the constitutional issue, the role of the Attorney General is to advise the Government, not the Oireachtas, but equally a proposal or at least the formula around a proposal needs to be on the table before you could ask the Attorney General or people with a constitutional legal bent who could advise or give their recommendations. I would have thought the policy aspect of it is key. I acknowledge the committee is doing further work on this but it has a lot of other things to do as well. There are two pathways here. One is for the committee to continue and finish its report while the other is that we ask a specific all-party committee to focus on this very narrow area of the Constitution and come up with a formula of words. This is something I will leave to the committee to consider. Alternatively, the Government could come forward with its wording. If the Government comes forward with its wording in isolation, it cannot take into account the wording that may come from this committee. That will still have to go back to the Oireachtas, which may make it easier for people to say they do not like the Government's wording and want to add this and that and then we are back to square one again, as in trying to resolve it. The Government can go to the people with a wording but the more consensus we can build up around the wording the better. Does that make sense? Either this committee finishes it, and it will finish its report anyway by December, or we just get a very sharp time-bound group that looks at the actual wording, possibly even taking wording from this committee. It really needs a constitutional legal lens as well to get it right, as far as possible. We can never guard against unintended consequences, because jurisprudence will lead us in a certain direction anyway.